


(me elevas al) espacio sideral

by odangoatama



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hood-Mills Family, Outlaw Queen - Freeform, spanish verse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 18:17:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13793412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odangoatama/pseuds/odangoatama
Summary: AU. Robin's got a thing for his new neighbor Regina, but she only speaks Spanish. So he decides to take up a new language.





	(me elevas al) espacio sideral

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted on tumblr, but i thought it'd be fun to upload it here. based on a prompt by Imagine_OQ on twitter - "Robin learning Spanish just so he can ask out his new neighbor Regina, who doesn't speak English."

When Robin first meets her, it’s because he has her mail.

He’d seen her move in about three weeks ago. She’d spent the better part of that day hauling in boxes from a moving truck. An older man was there as well, helping her clear out the truck before he drove it off. She was beautiful, he’ll unashamedly admit, and he would’ve taken the time to go introduce himself as her new neighbor, maybe offer some help carrying the last two boxes that sat on the sidewalk to the door of her new townhouse.

But he was running late as it was to take Roland to his mother’s for the weekend, and so when he’d finally managed to drag his entourage of a cranky four-year-old and his ten-year-old nephew out the door and to his car, he couldn’t spare the woman more than an interested glance in her direction. He didn’t see her again for the rest of that week, and he spent the majority of the second week wondering what was the best way to introduce himself at her door and establish a potential new friendship, as opposed to coming off as her new, creepy neighbor. By the time he’d worked up the confidence to do so a couple of days later however, his nerves had him deciding too much time had passed for such an introduction, and he’d reluctantly squashed the idea.

But it seems fate is on Robin’s side today, when he opens the small door to his assigned mailbox and finds that one envelope with her address on it had been mistakenly placed with the rest of his mail. His eyes catch the name on the corner of the envelope: _Regina Mills_.

He can’t help the grin on his face as he tucks the rest of his mail under his arm and makes his way over to her door. The time waiting for his knock to be answered seems both too long and all too short as he hastily tries to go over what he’ll say, hoping he doesn’t blunder through something as simple as _I have your mail._

He takes a breath as he hears the lock turn on the other side, smiling politely when the door opens and his new neighbor appears. “Hello.”

“Hello,” she replies, an accent weighing over the L’s of the word. She arches an eyebrow questioningly.

Robin holds up the envelope with her name. “I believe this is yours,” he tells her with a sheepish smile.

She stares blankly at him for half a second before taking a look at the envelope, glancing at his other hand carrying his own mail, and then understanding relaxes her expression. She reaches for the envelope with a polite smile, a quiet _thank you_ falling from her lips as she looks down at the envelope in her hand.

“I’m Robin, by the way,” he introduces himself, falling back into the introduction he’d rehearsed in his head two weeks before. “I live next door. I’d seen you’d moved in, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to introduce myself earlier, unfortunately…” he’s starting to ramble, he realizes at the same time that he notices that her expression’s gone blank again. Her eyebrows scrunch closer together in confusion.

He lets his rambling trail off, and her nose scrunches up in a way that Robin finds adorably distracting — enough so that he almost misses when she apologetically stumbles out, “I don’t speak English.”

Oh. Well that was a bit of an inconvenience.

Robin gives her a short nod of understanding. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes, “I… didn’t know…” he trails off again, unsure of what else he could say, what else she could understand. He holds out his hand to shake instead, his other — still gripping his mail — making a slightly awkward gesture toward himself as he reiterates, “I’m Robin.” He makes sure the words don’t stick together, self-conscious that his own accent might not be helping much in allowing her to translate for herself.

She smiles at him again, a wide grin that leaves Robin a little breathless as she reaches out to shake his hand. “Regina,” she supplies, though he already knows.

He smiles back, utterly speechless.

—

The next couple of weeks find him with his earphones on every spare chance he gets. During breaks at work, while his nephew Henry is at school and Roland naps at home, Robin soaks up as much as he can of language-learning YouTube channels, and fumbles through the Duolingo app he’d installed on his phone (with the notifications on — he needs all the motivation he can get, even if it feels more like pestering when the damn phone beeps while he’s busy).

After awkwardly inquiring that day at her doorstep, Regina had confirmed that she spoke Spanish, a language he’d admittedly done poorly with when he was in school. That stunning smile of hers however (the very one he couldn’t seem to get out of his head), had him optimistically deciding there was no harm in trying again (and the potential new benefit of having a chance to woo his new neighbor certainly served as a good motivator).

His boys had even gotten in on some of the action, with his hyperactive toddler being surprisingly interested in the YouTube videos teaching them both simple greetings and how to count from one to ten. Henry had served as a helper himself, with the small number of words he’d learned from school, and the rest the boy stuck around to learn with his uncle.

Meanwhile, he finds a way to establish a friendship with his neighbor that works around their language barrier. It starts with simple waves and greetings as they catch each other going in or out the door. She has more boxes to unload one day from her car, and he has the chance this time to offer his help getting them all to her door. She lets him inside that day, thanking him with that gorgeous smile of hers, and a tupperware container of powdery cookies ( _polvorones_ , she calls them, and he nods dumbly, too entranced by her to pick up the new word for his Spanish vocabulary).

He and the boys devour the cookies that night, and he sheepishly gives her back the freshly-washed tupperware the next day. “ _Delicioso_ ,” he says, trying not to cringe at his accent, and at the fact that no matter how he tries he cannot for the life of him make his mouth deliver the proper sounds that resonate perfectly in his head. It makes her laugh though, causing those pesky butterflies in his belly to go wild, so he suffers quietly, and powers through.

He’s opening Duolingo one day, with one earphone in as he arrives home from work. It’d been a busy week, and he hadn’t gotten much free time to lend to studying. But the boys are both gone for the weekend, and when his phone pings with a reminder from the language app that he’d neglected all week, he opens it, figuring he could spare a half hour before getting started on his dinner.

He’s moving through the short walkway to his door when he hears Regina’s voice.

“Robin!” It’s accented, the ‘R’ of his name slightly rolled, and he can’t deny that it does things to him. Forcing back a shiver, he turns to the sound of her voice, and realizes that while messing with his phone he’d missed seeing her car parked out front again. She’s standing by the trunk, waving sheepishly, and looking stressed.

He makes his way over to her and finds more boxes in the trunk when he reaches her, all of them marked ‘ZELENA’ in green Sharpie.

“Help?” she asks him.

“Of course,” he answers, shoving his phone in his pocket to free his hand. He reaches for the first box, finding it to be much heavier than he expected. He lifts it out of the trunk with a soft _oompf_ , and turns toward her house.

The box tugs on the cord of his earphones as he walks up the steps to her door, and he realizes he never took the one bud out of his ear before shoving his phone in his pocket. He tries to be careful, is mindful of his phone being tugged around in his pocket as he moves with the box, but when he bends to put the box down on her living room floor, the cord catches on a corner, tugging his phone out of his pocket when he straightens up and it hits the floor.

He winces as the bud is pulled from his ear, and Regina bends down to pick the phone up. She pauses, looking at the lit up screen before arching an eyebrow at him. She doesn’t offer it back, but merely angles the phone so he can see Duolingo waiting for him to pronounce the word _manzana_ into the speaker.

Robin can feel the heat creeping up his neck, spreading to his cheeks as she smirks at him. She unplugs the earphone cord from the jack, pressing the speaker icon on the app so it repeats the word.

_Manzana_.

“ _Manzana_ ,” she repeats softly so the phone doesn’t catch it, enunciating each syllable in a way that gives him another shiver. She holds his phone up toward his mouth, still smirking.

He tries to tamp down his self-consciousness, tries to meet her smirk with one of his own as he musters up the confidence to lean into the speaker of his phone and repeat, “ _Manzana_.”

Her smirk widens to that brilliant smile Robin’s been daydreaming of for the past few weeks, and he can think of no greater incentive to keep this going.

(he also thinks he’s probably skipping dinner to make up this week’s studying.)

 


End file.
